Category: Site News

This website is very old. It’s been with me for many years. There are plenty of articles which are useful both for myself and the rest of the world. Bit by bit, word by word, link by link, image by image, this site was filled and filled over the years. Technologies changed. Some new techniques and concepts came up. Some old ones faded away. Spending as much time as I possible can (after everything else) on this site, sometimes I manage to introduce big changes – like a new bit of functionality or a totally different look. Not to confuse and scare everyone, I try to be open about the changes that were made. When something big is changed I post a description of what it was and why I felt the change was needed. These updates are published in this category.

All is fixed. Finally.

It’s been more than a month since my upgrade to WordPress 2.0.2. The upgrade went just fine, but it broke one important piece of functionality. I used to have a few pages that used PHP Exec plugin (things like the Archives and Blogroll).

Unfortunately, PHP Exec plugin does not work in the newer WordPress. A few alternative solutions are available, but I was waiting for this one to get fixed, as I didn’t want to change anything myself.

I got tired of waiting and fixed everything today myself. I used a somewhat hacky workaround. One of the useful features of WordPress is that it allows templates for pages. It is possible to have one page look and feel very different from another page. So, I simply created page templates for all my stuff that used PHP Exec, and copied things over.

All is finally back. My apologies for the long delay.

More thoughts on reorganization

Spring is here and, as always, it makes me think of reorganizing this blog a bit. Don’t worry, I’m not going to break it hard this time. I am happy with the software so far.

Instead, I will break the site into several more. I tried it before and, although not all parts worked very well, I’m glad I did. Reorganizations help me stay focused.

The reason for reorganization is that this blog once again turned into a little bit of everything. I write about everything – from technology to parenting – here and also do a whole bunch of pictures. That’s not very good. Looking closely at people who come here, I can’t find anyone who reads all of my posts. Some people read those, and others – read these, but noone reads everything, and that’s not right.

So, I am thinking about:

  • Creating a separate blog for my parenting posts. It will most probably be in Russian, and it will have all pictures of Maxim, Olga, me, and the rest of the family, when appropriate. Hopefully, Olga will join me in writing posts there. Maxim is getting more active and creative, and it’s a shame to leave all the fun that we are having out of the world history. The choice of Russian language, I think, is more appropriate here, as both Olga and I can describe things better in it, rather than in English.
  • Creating a separate blog for my movie reviews. Those are very well structured bits of data, and they are very specific too. These will continue in Engish and will use the same form. I am also considering the use of microformat to increase the audience, and to, hopefully, make a little bit of money via Google Ads.
  • Creating a separate blog for technology related posts, but this will be done (if it will be done) at a much later stage. There are too many things to worry about as things are.

As I mentioned, this is not the first time that I move things out of this blog. I did so before. Here are a couple of examples to remind you about:

  • XA-XA-XA – a separate blog for the Russian jokes. This one works pretty good. Postings are regular, resources are plenty, and my enthusiasm about it is pretty high. The audience is growing too.
  • Cyprus Scout – a separate blog for my Cyprus related posts. This one doesn’t do as well, as I originally hoped. My interests have shifted to other domains, and the audience wasn’t pushy enough for me to work more on it. I am planning to give a last try though, with call for editors. If one or more people will be contributing to it, I’ll be coming back occasionally to add my cents.
  • My LiveJournal – a place where I speak Russian. Rarely, and with no particular topic or direction. But I still feel pretty good about having it.

Anyway, I am still thinking about doing all these. My mind is not made up yet (although it’s heading there) and you can still influence my decisions. What do you think about all this?

Upgraded to WordPress 2.0.2

Ok, guys.  I’ve been planning to do this for about three month now. WordPress 2.0.2 is way too sweet (I know this from using it for my other projects) for me to use 1.5.2, so here it goes.

I’ve upgraded this blog.  It was easier than I expected (I tried it on another, simplier installation o’mine).  The secret was in the cleanup of unused plugins.  Since I’ve tried a bunch of things, there were cluttering up in my plugins/ directory.  As soon as I removed all unused ones, I had only a few plugins to check for compatibility.

Sadly, not everything works after the upgrade.  One of the plugins that I heavily rely on – phpexec – doesnt’ work.  I’ll fix it ASAP, but for now it means that archives and blogroll are out of reach.

If you’ll notice any other strange behavior, please let me know.

P.S.: The WYSIWYG editor and AJAX admin interface are so shweeet…

Migration to Flickr: not so fast

Flickr upload: 100%In the excitement of move to Flickr, I totally forgot about one thing – bandwidth limitations. Even when I was reminded that they exist, I simply ignored the signs. Even though I have a professional account that allows for 2 GBytes per month, I should have checked the size of my photo gallery before I started the move.

I have uploaded albums from 1995, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and a few from 2004, when my limits were out. I checked the size of my entire photo gallery and was somewhat shocked to find out that it was more than 2 year’s worth of uploads at this rate.

Apparently, there is a thread at Flickr forums where several people ask Flickr to give them a way to upload more. Even if that means paying more. I joined with ‘me too’. Flickr is a nice tool and the more I use the more I like. There are tons of features, and possibly the cleanest user interface out of all webservices out there.

In the light of this limitation however, I’ll have to somewhat review my migration process.

Firstly, I’ll be adding new images to my current gallery, not to Flickr. Hopefully, I’ll be uploading faster than making new pictures. So, eventually I’ll have it all at Flickr.

Secondly, I’ll have to trim my photo gallery a bit. There’s just too much noise, which I don’t care about. Although some people would probably find some pictures pleasurable. I’ll be going through the gallery, deleting bad pictures, and slightly compressing the rest of them. Images that come out of my camera are usually bigger than 3 MBytes. But they are totally uncompressed. A reduction of 10% quality, which is not even noticable can bring the image size down to 1 MByte. Before I didn’t have any space or bandwidth limitations, so I didn’t care. Now, I am very willing to sucrifice 10% of quality for 66% of the size. I am not going to resize pictures to 1024×768 though.

Thirdly, my uploads to Flickr will be in large batches. So, instead of adding a few pictures every day, evenly through a month, I’ll be adding a few thousand during the first few days, until I hit my bandwidht limitation. This way, I’ll save a lot of time, albeit will make it hard to follow for those of you who do. That’s temporary though, so, you can ignore me for the time being.

I guess that’s it.